Daniel Ellsberg 1931-2023

DANIEL ELLSBERG 1931-2023

In 1968, as thousands of Americans and Vietnamese were dying in the Vietnam War, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-AR) held hearings on the war, probing deeply into the fallacies and misreading of history underlying US policy in Vietnam. Of course, this was at a time when Congress was fulfilling its Constitutional duty of checking the President. The hearings were devastating; Pres. Johnson refused to run for reelection in 1968 because of the increasing unpopularity of the war. But Pres. Nixon (1969-74) continued the war.

Three years later in 1971 Daniel Ellsberg, a man with elite credentials and Cold War background (Marine Corps, Rand Corp.) decided that his conscience could not endure any more of the war, and he published “the Pentagon Papers-7,000 government pages of damning revelations about deception by successive presidents who exceeded their authority, bypassed Congress and misled the American people.” Of course, Nixon went after Ellsberg and the New York Times (which published the Pentagon Papers) to no avail: at that time, we had a more liberal US Supreme Court. Ellsberg finished what the Fulbright committee had begun. The US finally got out of Vietnam in 1975.

To Ellsberg’s credit, his activism did not stop. He opposed nuclear proliferation, the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War. From 1971 he was on the anti-war, progressive side of history. 

Source: The New York Times, 6/16/23